Italian producer Cristiano Crisci’s second album as Clap! Clap! finds him continuing to combine electronic textures with West African sounds and influences. A Thousand Skies is nominally a concept album, with a story about a young girl traveling mystically through space. Song titles like “Betelgeuse’s Endless Bamboo Oceans” and “Ode to the Pleiades” show Crisci’s commitment to the idea. Since the album is largely wordless, how well the music supports the concept is debatable.
What Clap! Clap! does very well is present his songs in a wide variety of styles. A Thousand Skies is a briskly paced album, with 12 of its 15 tracks clocking in under three minutes long. Each song is a distinct idea, and Crisci avoids the electronic music tendency to beat every idea into the ground with repetitive seven-minute tracks. This combination of stylistic peripateticism and brevity make the record an easy, engaging listen.
Not every song is a hit, though. “Ar-Raqis” begins with an intriguing rhythm played on African drums, throws in a vocal sample used as rhythmic accompaniment, and buttresses it with skeletal electronic chords. It’s a pretty simple concept that relies too heavily on the drum rhythm to function as its hook. It’s an interesting rhythm, but not interesting enough to carry the entire song. “Centripetal” follows a similar pattern. It relies on a cool, complex rhythm to do the heavy lifting but fails to fill in the rest of the track with anything engaging. “Discessus” uses what sounds like a field recording of a simple tribal beat and chant and accentuates it with a pair of flute sounds and a rudimentary bassline. At 92 seconds long, the song doesn’t wear out its welcome. But one gets the feeling that the unadorned original recording may have been just as engaging for 92 seconds and Crisci didn’t really add much of substance.
Those are the exceptions, though. For the most part A Thousand Skies engages. “Betelgeuse’s Endless Bamboo Oceans” marries a hard house beat to chanting voices and skittering African rhythms, and changes up the beat in the song’s second half. “Elephant Serenade” builds a loping track around a recording of what sounds like a poorly played but musically interesting flugelhorn (or some even more unusual brass instrument). And closer “Ascension Psalm” works wonderfully. A high-pitched chant bleeds into warm synth chords, and a simple, catchy melody played with a wobbly, oscillating tone. Late in the song, as the simple melody starts to get old, a counter-melody enters to liven up the track.
“Rainbow Coast” uses compelling flute sounds on top of hard beats before softening into an electric guitar and electric piano solos. “Rainy Souls, Gloomy Futures” piles an oppressive, doomy melody on top of fast-paced West African beats. Also notable is the upbeat, chirpy de facto title track, “A Thousand Skies Under Cepheus’ Erudite Eyes”, which is an effective counterbalance to “Rainy Souls.”
The album features a trio of longer songs where Clap! Clap! fleshes out his ideas a bit more thoroughly. “Hope” features three different hooks. First, there’s a slow and simple descending synth pattern, which is supplanted by a quick fingerpicked string instrument melody. Then a separate synth sound comes in with a catchy staccato figure. All the while, there are quiet vocal punctuations, which the song eventually clarifies into the repetition of the word “hope” in between the main hooks. “Nguwe” uses another guest vocalist Bongeziwe Mabandla to great effect, building a high energy banger around his vocals. The synths on the track are as warm as ever, but the beats are fast and pulsing, and Mabandla matches the energy of the music. The six-minute album centerpiece “Ode to the Pleiades” feels like a musical journey. It travels from what sounds like a Moroccan bazaar, complete with an oud (the Mediterranean string instrument used everywhere from Greece to Saudi Arabia to Egypt) riff, through more warm synth chords, and into a jazzy piano solo. The piano solo is unexpected and a very welcome change of pace for the album. That change of pace and Clap! Clap!’s brevity everywhere else on the record makes the fact that the solo goes on for four minutes a completely forgivable indulgence.
By keeping his electronic manipulations warm and mostly low-key, Clap! Clap! strikes an effective balance with his African sounds. It’s a cool combination that mostly works, but it also tends to mute his hooks. By focusing on the West African rhythms and simple synth chords, A Thousand Skies lacks the big, catchy bits that would make his songs take off. Instead, it ends up as a smooth record to listen to where it’s easy to zone out and let the music fade into the background. Unless “background music” is his goal, Clap! Clap! might want to tweak his formula the next time out.